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Abstract:
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Research in second language acquisition has described the positive effects of observing iconic gestures on vocabulary acquisition (Kelly, McDevitt, & Esch, 2009; Macedonia, Müller, & Friederici, 2011; Tellier, 2008) and recent studies have also proven that observing speech with beat gestures can improve L2 learners’ production of suprasegmental features in a foreign language (Gluhareva & Prieto, in press), as well as in word recall (Kushch, Igualada, & Prieto, submitted). However little is known about the role of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimicks melody in speech (e.g. the so-called pitch gestures) in the learning of L2 intonational variations across languages. Recently, Morett & Chang (2014) demonstrated that the production of visuospatial features of pitch gestures by English learners of Mandarin enhanced discrimination between the meanings of Mandarin words differing only in tone. However, it is not clear whether the specific gains obtained in this study can be mostly attributed to the production or to the perception of these gestures by second language learners. The goal of this investigation is to explore the gain of observing vs. producing pitch gestures during a short multimodal training of Mandarin Chinese tones on tonal discrimination abilities and on learning newly presented Mandarin words that only differ in tone. Fifty-seven Catalan-dominant native speakers participated in a short training on Mandarin Chinese tones where the instructor produced pitch gestures. The results show that producing gestures favors tone discrimination and word recall more than merely repeating the word and viewing the gesture. Accordingly, the production of pitch gestures by beginning learners of Mandarin Chinese can serve as a facilitator for learning tones and vocabulary. |
